The planning phase is all about understanding what you have been asked to do and working out the best combination of activities that will give you the outcome you need, within the time, budgetary and resource constraints of the project. It is your job as a UX professional to deliver the best user experience within the time and budget available.

The key principle for all UX projects is that you must ensure that you involve users in the design process in some way. Challenge yourself to see how you can work within the constraints of the project to involve users as much as possible. User involvement will not only improve the output of the project but will also help to inform decision making which can often delay projects. UX projects typically consist of three main phases: a research phase, a design phase and a further research phase, designed to test and validate the designs.

• The research phase is where you immerse yourself in the project to get the background you’ll need to make design decisions later in the project. During this phase you will try to learn as much about your client’s business, objectives, users and competitors as possible.
• The design phase is where you work out how what you are designing will work and how it will fit together. This phase will define its scope, its features and functionality and how it behaves.
• The validation phase is where you identify whether what you came up with in the design phase actually works with its intended audience. This phase is typically followed by further rounds of design and testing to solve the problems you inevitably find when you test with users.

We find that using a research, design and validation framework helps to structure your projects. We often start working out the approach we would ideally like to take and then calculate how long we would need to do that work and then adjust the methods, tools and techniques to fit the constraints of the project.

Choosing UX Tools & Techniques

• Stakeholder Interviews Talk to key individuals within your client’s organization to understand business requirements.
• Requirements Workshops Gather key stakeholders together to discuss the brief and conduct exercises to give you a deeper understanding of the project.Complex design challenges. Complex clients. Disparate teams.
• Lab Usability Testing Involving end users in the design process to understand their needs, find out how they do things and see if they can use your products in a controlled environment.
• Remote Usability Testing Conducting user research in a different location than where your user is situated.
• Competitor Benchmarking Evaluating competitor products to determine their strengths and weaknesses and opportunities to innovate with your own product.
• Contextual Research Conducting research in the environment that users are naturally within.
• Analytics Evaluating quantitative data to understand what people are doing when using a product or service.
• Surveys Collecting information from a dispersed set of people by asking them to respond to a predetermined set of questions.
• Expert Reviews Evaluate an existing product based on a set of usability guidelines, the target users and their tasks.
• Ideation Workshops A collaborative design method to help you and your client decide on design solutions.